The Great Books Aren't Too Difficult for Students--Their Translations Often Are
Barriers to adopting the Great Books in the Middle and High School Classroom
Recently I have been part of some conversations about encouraging the addition or option for more Great Books in the average Middle and High School classroom here in Nebraska.
Many of us at the table agree that one of the chief difficulties in adopting any of these texts is the perceived inaccessibility or difficulty of the Great Books. This, in turn, is linked inextricably and unfortunately with one of the more appealing things about the Great Books: the ease and availability of free online translations.
Let us take, for example, Aeschylus’ Eumenides. The final part of the bloody trilogy about family curses, justice, matricide, and the foundations of trial by jury. The general English teacher searching for a text online can feel hounded by search results like Orestes himself pursued by countless Furies.
Let’s compare two lines—verses 94-95 from the Eumenides where the ghost of Clytemnestra tries awaken the sleeping Furies who have let her son/murderer escape—across some of the top search results.
First, here is the top Google search result, Herbert Weir Smyth’s (1926) Loeb edition:
Sleep on ! Aha ! Yet what need is there of sleepers ?
'Tis due to you that I am thus dishonoured among the other dead1
But let’s imagine your school has the budget (say, $480 for 30 copies) to drop on Amazon’s top result. Robert Fagles (1975) version of the same lines:
So, you can sleep…
Awake, awake—what use are sleepers now?
I go shorn of honor, thanks to you
I mean no disrespect to Fagles, but “shorn” either seems a misreading of ἀπατιμάω (to remove honors) for ἀποτέμνω (to cut off, shear) or is introducing an unnecessary metaphor, a metaphor lost on most students.2
Those of us who may have read Greek tragedy in college and wish to order used copies of the Grene and Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedies will find Richmond Lattimore (1953) with a translation-ese “thus” sprinkled here and there through the text.
You would sleep, then? And what use are you, if you sleep?
It is because of you I go dishonored thus
among the rest of the dead.
Hidden, though, on the second page of my search results, I did find Ian Johnston’s online (and free for teachers!) translation of the Eumenides.
Ah, you may be fast asleep, but now
what use is sleeping? On account of you,
I alone among the dead lack honour.
This seems to be a very acceptable translation for the modern English student. And best of all it is free.
If we want more students to read the Great Books, we need to do a better job of guiding our teachers to decent translations. We need perhaps fewer Great Books Lists and more Great, or at least Useful, Translations Lists. Which books would you like to see on a translations list?
This search also revealed that Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s (1979) edition seems curiously close to a Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V version of Smyth’s translation:
Sleep on! Aha! And what is the use of you asleep?
And I, thus dishonored at your hands
among the dead
Lloyd-Jones did edit and update the Loeb edition of Smyth, but that hardly seems justification of printing under another publication an independent translation of his own without acknowledge Smyth.
Shearing is a rather unfitting metaphor to add to a speech loaded with hunting imagery. Alan Sommerstein’s Loeb edition (2008), I would argue, also misses tone and imagery by adding the now almost exclusively nautical “ahoy” to Clytemnestra’s address to the Furies.
I quite like the Cambridge Translations from Greek Drama series, and they seem perfect for schools: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classical-studies/classical-literature/series/cambridge-translations-greek-drama.